Long Time Coming

It’s been a while since this site has seen some action. The last post was November of 2008, and while that’s pretty horrible, I’m sure this isn’t the first site to fall victim to neglect. Now, many months, a fresh coat of paint and a new CMS later I have to say it’s good to be back.

The itch to redesign started last fall, and after many iterations (you’re looking at version six) it was time to build out the templates. That was the easy part. In the midst of the redesign I got it in my head that I needed to graduate from WordPress to a more robust and flexible platform. I’d been working with ExpressionEngine for a while and found it easy to implement and a breeze to adapt to whatever configuration I wanted to throw at it. With that thrown into the equation, I shelved the idea of a quick launch as I didn’t have the time to work on the back-end with a full time job and freelance gigs (not to mention being the father of a three year old).

So the clock ticked on, but eventually I found myself with enough time to start a local build out of EE and began the process of setting up my site, piece by piece. Slowly but surely the site began to take form and after a couple of months tweaking here and there it was ready for prime time. Again I have to give props to the ExpressionEngine team for making a CMS that is not only simple to get up and running, but is also rather easy to move from a local environment to remote server. Just a few configuration changes later and it was good to go. I’d also like to add that the excellent ExpressionEngine screencasts by Ryan Irelan and the wonderful support of the EE community made the process of building and migrating a painless endeavor.

As for the design itself, I tried my best to adhere to a simple grid layout (fluid that is) while adding some nice, progressively enhanced touches: rounded corners via border-radius, subtle use of text-shadow and box-shadow, use of nth child to style the appearance of the posts on the home page, as well as a little jQuery thrown in here and there for good measure.

As is the case for any redesign, this is and will always be a work in progress. I’m not finished with it by any means, but to finally have it live is a great feeling.